I think we agree. The subtelty is that, it is about closed and open systems. Your partial knowledge makes things a locally open system. You are processing new data and then acting accordingly. That's dynamic agency. The better you can get knowledge, the better you can influence the next step.

That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe. Even though at the meta-meta level, that realization itself can be deterministic.

Not to be confused with someone who would be external to the system and could watch your life as if it was a video tape, being omniscient. They would not have agency in your system as they can't interact with you and for them everything is predetermined, and they could compute the next state of the system from the past state. You can't but the system is impredicative enough that by recognizing this, by self-consciousness, the system effects itself toward its own favored state. And in fact, the more knowledge you have, the less agency. Because the fewer choices.

The meta level person doesn't just observe how the video. It observes the fact that people realize they are characters in a video and how that realization affects the choices they make. Given the initial conditions.

Should you have regrets in life? You had the choice of knowing more and be more able so it makes sense. Could things have happened differently given that they did and obviously you wanted back then for them to be different and wish they had been? Or did it happen because the conditions were set to happen?

Basically the question is whether we control our odds? Doing anything is controlling some odds so I'd say yes. Requires increased self consciousness. Being able to imagine what is not there. Animals seem to have that capacity. Especially humans. We can make sure that certain things don't happen by virtue of our own existence. This is our agency. Are we biased by construction toward the best odds of we can recognize them? Yes. Are their really things with the exact same odds in the system? Wouldn't that block us? Probably. But the system is already made in a way that it wouldn't happen by virtue of having (at least local) asymmetries. In practice we wouldn't be blocked. Someone perfectly symmetrical in a system that also is, would perhaps. But there might not be any two same most desired odds then so no. Unlikely.

▲

vidarh 3 days ago | parent [-]

So again, this is basically the compatibilist stance. To me, it rings hollow because it glosses over whether you actually made a decision in a way that is qualtitively different from how a clock "chooses" to move the minute hand one minute further.

And so I would answer to your question about regrets that I don't believe you had that choice. That you couldn't have chosen differently given the same inputs and state. Your "choice" followed the preceding state with the same predictability as a well functioning clock.

	▲	aatd86 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting thought exercise, let me try something: Only if we can predict everything ourselves do we not have a choice. But since we don't know what we don't know and that may occur at any moment (black swan), we can only act given probabilities. Then what we control is our level of appetite for risk of an undesired outcome. That risk is not data that we can reliably measure and assert. So it creates randomness/stochasticity in the system. That's why I was speaking of open vs closed system. Randomness provides agency. That randomness is subjective. You may well still be predictable for an omniscient person. But that person would not have any agency. You do as long as your choice does not rely upon knowledge. I guess that's why the human society is weird in a sense. People act from belief they have no certitude about. A clock does not do that, there is no metacognitive process to influence an action toward a yet unrealised future. Seems incomparable? But yes, other than that, there is not real accurate way to deny compatibilism I'm afraid. In fact, true agency is the attempt to eliminate choice. It is like being in a Labyrinth where the walls are moving. The clock sits in the labyrinth and gets crushed by a moving wall. An agentic person detects the movements and recalibrates.